PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE : Movie stars on a stage near you.

If you live in a fair-sized city or near one, you will soon be receiving an eye-catching and idealistic brochure in your mail. Eye-catching because it will feature color photos of actors strikingly dressed (or undressed) and caught in highly dramatic postures of combat or lovemaking or emotional confrontation. Idealistic because this pamphlet, dispatched from the regional repertory theater nearest you, lists not only the admirable plays that have been served up in the last nine months but also the equally ambitious schedule in the works for next fall. Perhaps there is a patriotic envoi: this theater is one of your state's chief sources of pride, has been boosted by the governor, and is the recipient of state and national awards. At this point, theater attendance takes on the urgency of socially responsible stock investment.

In other words, your local rep is in big trouble. Always has been, always will be, but it keeps soldiering on with various strategies, including guilt-mongering subscription campaigns to be carried on by phone if that brochure doesn't do the trick. Regional theater, which forty years ago seemed a viable alternative to the financial excess and artistic decadence of Broadway, now comes across as a luxurious tropical flower whose existence can only be maintained by wealthy horticultural aficionados (that is, the monies of patrons or cultural foundations) and skillful crossbreeding (that is, Broadway producers sometimes back a repertory production, then take the show over after a short local run and bring it to Broadway).

Yet regional theater survives, even if it never quite thrives, and, even more miraculously, continues to fill the huge gap left by the theaters, Broadway and off-Broadway, of New York. And what is that gap?

Let us look at the "Goings On About Town" theater section of a recent New Yorker. There we find, in the "Long Run" section, several expensively mounted musicals, a ticket to any of which will cost you the same amount of money you spent on your child for a semester of college. But, if you flip to the "Opened Recently" section, you will discover quite a different sort of fare:

* The Gathering: "Will Power's one-man show..."

* Stones in His Pocket: "In Marie Jones's comedy...Sean Campion and Conleh Hill portray all the characters."

* Cartas: A Nun in Love: "A stage adaptation of correspondence translated and performed by Myriam Cyr."

* High Dive: "In her one-woman comedy, Leslie Ayvazian...gives audience members the opportunity to read minor roles from their seats..."

* I Will Bear Witness: "A stage version [that is, a one-man reading] of the diaries of Victor Klemperer..."

* Momma: "In her one-woman show, Siobhan Fallon..."

* The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: "Lily Tomlin is back on Broadway in the one-woman, thirteen-character show..."

And this is just a partial list. Because of a desperate economics that I won't try to grapple with here, New York theater is gradually narrowing itself to two sorts of entertainment: the million-dollar musical and the sawbuck monologue. The big casts, huge sets, and computerized lighting tricks of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and the Disney entertainments (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) are gambles of big bucks in the hope of making huge fortunes, while the one- and two-actor shows are a minimization of costs designed to make a small profit, which will then be invested in the next minimalist theater piece. Of course, there are also plenty of new plays opening with the usual medium-sized casts. Some of them (Wit immediately comes to mind) are superb, but even these shows try to hold down costs by having their actors walk through invisible settings waving invisible props.

What's conspicuously absent most of the time from New York is the full-scale, handsomely visualized production of multicharacter classic plays. 'Twas not always so. In fact, aside from the great musicals and the rare sensational dramatic premiere (Streetcar, Salesman, etc.), the real newsmaking New York productions from the twenties to the early sixties were the big revivals of classics: the Guthrie McClintic productions starring his wife, Katharine Cornell--Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Three Sisters (which Time featured as its cover story during the final year of World War II when news of Allied victories was competing for print space); Michael Cacoyannis's record-breaking off-Broadway staging of The Trojan Women starring Mildred Dunnock; Judith Anderson and John Gielgud in Medea; Orson Welles's innovative revivals of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Dr. Faustus; the Lunts and Uta Hagen in The Seagull; Katharine Hepburn in As You Like It; Ruth Gordon in The Country Wife and A Doll's House; Eva LeGallienne in Hedda Gabler; two (count 'em--two!) competing Broadway productions of Hamlet with Gielgud's melancholy Dane facing off against Leslie Howard's. The list goes on and on. The yoking of star power with classic text produced the sort of full-blooded entertainment that stayed in people's minds for decades and became, literally, the sort of show they told their children about.

The current absence of this sort of American theater has created a remarkable artistic vacancy, and it is to the great credit of local repertory theaters that they try to fill this gap. They not only regularly present the classics but flesh them out in largish productions complete with substantial sets and, when necessary, lots of bodies on stage, since local, nonprofessional actors can be drafted at little expense. (Frank Langella's New York production of Cyrano de Bergerac eliminated the all-important crowds in the dueling and battle scenes. This would never have happened in a reputable local rep production.)

Admirable. But what's missing from the repertory theater picture? Stars. Well, so what? Are stars so important? Shouldn't we rather rejoice at the absence of overpaid celebrities?

In an interview he gave many years ago, Laurence Olivier spoke of theater as "the glamorization of thought," which remains the best definition I know of what theater, specifically the classic theater of highly charged language and outsized characters, does. When outsized actors aren't available to embody the tremendous visions of certain playwrights, when there's no actor of Olivier's electricity to communicate Shakespeare's vision of jealousy in Othello, when an Eileen Atkins isn't on hand to incarnate Shaw's idea of incipient Protestantism in Saint Joan, when it's not Jason Robards conveying the full blast of O'Neil's bleakness in The Iceman Cometh, the thought immanent in the text does not truly surface. It's commonly believed that musical comedies and lightweight plays are the venues of glamour while sheer dogged seriousness is enough to convey Sophocles and Shakespeare. Just the opposite is true. I've seen amateur productions of musical comedies in which much of the charm of the piece came across even though glamour was totally absent from the cast. But if you've ever seen even a good production of Lear with only a journeyman actor on hand to howl imprecations at the heavens, you probably had a very boring time. Without glamour, masterpieces shrivel.

The movies drained much glamour from the stage. We never got to see Marlon Brando's Hamlet or Meryl Streep's Beatrice or Robert De Niro's Iago. But what the movies stole, they may yet give back. Now that the studios cater to ever younger audiences with ever younger stars in ever goofier vehicles, actors (especially the distaff members of the profession) are considered over the hill at thirty-five. Unless they're willing to humble their talents in character parts in movies, more and more major talents may turn back to the stage. If they still want to play the great stage roles they've always dreamed of, it is likely they'll be willing to negotiate with the better regional companies to do the very plays that provide the real star-power roles: the classics. This is already happening. For instance, the Hartford Stage Company's recent commitment to reviving the work of Tennessee Williams has attracted the services of Rip Torn and Elizabeth Ashley. It is too early to call this a trend, but if so, it is a case of "back to the future": it was common practice in nineteenth-century theater for stars like Edwin Booth on tour to perform with local theater companies. In the musical world, this remained common practice; there's nothing unusual in Andrea Boccelli or Placido Domingo appearing with the Pittsburgh or the Santa Fe Symphony, or Christopher Plummer performing his one-man Henry V show with the Hartford Symphony playing William Walton's music as accompaniment. Why shouldn't the theater world follow suit? And if the stars mitigate the perpetual financial woe of the reps, all the better.

Until they do, our culture will continue suffering a very tidy, limited lobotomy. Only one lobe of its imaginative life has been removed and the patient is doing very well, thank you, ambling along pretty much as it always has. But am I mistaken in thinking that a certain intellectual glint in the eyes is gone? For what is a culture like without the glamorization of thought?